The Naked Zoo

Drugs N’ Kisses

The Naked Zoo
USA 1970
Directed by William Grefé  
Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Okay, this one will have some spoilers.

The Naked Zoo is the fifth of the seven films presented in Arrow’s wonderful He Came From The Swamp - The William Grefé Collection. It’s also presented in its original, shorter cut... which had reshoots and re-edits by somebody else and included extra nudity and a performance by Canned Heat... plus the longer version (which I watched), which is the best assembly Grefé could get from multiple sources of his original director’s cut. Like The Psychedelic Priest (reviewed here), it’s a very loose film in that, although it has a set up and a great punchline to that introduction in the last few seconds of the film before the credits run, it’s got very little narrative structure at all and feels, for the most part, like a load of scenes put together almost randomly, to convey an attitude of the kind of drug and free love culture of the time rather than anything else.  

The film stars Steve Oliver as main protagonist Terry Shaw (and also antagonist, as far as I’m concerned), a writer of poetry who doesn’t have a publisher with enough cash to get his second book out and who sleeps with various young ladies throughout the course of the movie in his swinging, bachelor lifestyle but also sleeps with older women, using and abusing them to get their monetary gifts as a kind of gigolo. One of these older ladies is Mrs. Golden, played by Rita Hayworth in one of her last movie roles. There’s a nice story about how Grefé managed to get her agent to agree to her involvement in the They Came From The Swamp - The Films Of William Grefé  documentary (reviewed here), by dumping the initially declined and not nearly adequate amount of cash on her agent’s desk up front.

Miss Hayworth’s scenes are, it has to be said, the only real sequences which you could possibly credit with having any kind of traditional narrative or story follow through in them. Grefé managed to get a big name star to hang his movie on but I suspect he only had her for a few days so her scenes are few and far between but, scattered through the movie at intervals, between parties. And I do mean between parties, as the majority of the rest of the ‘action’ involves us following Terry as he goes from mood swing to mood swing at various ‘cool cat’ drugs and ladies parties, even going so far as to go nuts and start a camp fire in one apartment which, when viewed by today’s young ‘uns, probably looks more than a little strange. And, yeah, okay it is but it’s also not uncommon for stuff like this to be happening in films at the time, as a kind of ‘character short hand’ for just how free and liberal everyone is. Grefé tilts the camera, swings it around and does multiple visions within the frame to match the antics and drug trips of various characters and it all goes pretty well, even though a lot of the characters, including Terry, come off as pretty mean spirited and not fun people to be with.

The scenes with Rita Hayworth are the anchors for the whole story (such as it is) and things kick off when her wheelchair bound husband catches her and Terry 'in the act' and runs amok... okay, wheels around amok, firing a pistol and trying to kill them. He doesn’t succeed in this but does manage to accidentally kill himself by running his wheelchair into the fireplace and knocking his head. Terry abandons Mrs. Golden to sort it all out herself and assumes he is in her will, so he stands to inherit her cash. In a later scene near the end, he finds out about her heart condition, deliberately gives her the wrong psychedelic pills to exacerbate that condition and then gives her the scare of her life posing as her dead husband. She dies of a heart attack and... well, I guess she does leave him her money in the will because he gets his next book published and it’s a roaring success.

And it’s not a great film but it chugs along at its own pace just fine and I think I’m really beginning to like this director now. I’m grateful to Arrow for releasing this set because, there’s no way any of his titles would have grabbed my attention and now he’s definitely on my radar as someone to watch.

The great thing is it’s got a nice, twist reveal ending. And I almost didn’t see it coming because the format of the film as a rag tag bunch of scenes drifting together to make a whole really doesn’t tip you off to the fact that the film would have this kind of reveal... and it involves a character who the audience hasn’t met yet and is only briefly mentioned in a scene early in the movie. I saw it coming literally only one minute before it happens and, without giving anything away, if finishes the movie with a freeze frame moment where you know exactly what’s going to happen without the director actually showing it... which is a nice thing here. Sometimes a bit of restraint and holding back can certainly pay off.

All in all, I really quite liked The Naked Zoo, once I’d warmed up to it a bit. I’m not sure I’d know anyone in my circle of friends I would recommend it to and I’m not sure where the audience for this one is at these days but, I had a good time with it and, if you want to take that as a recommendation, then that’s fine by me.

Requiem For A Vampire

Unturned We Stand

Requiem For A Vampire
aka Requiem Pour Un Vampire
aka Caged Virgins
France 1972
Directed by Jean Rollin  
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Vampiric spoilers being
whipped up in the dungeons of this review.

Requiem For A Vampire is the fourth of Jean Rollin’s personal feature length films (aka non-porno and mostly vampire themed) following on from The Rape Of The Vampire (reviewed here), The Nude Vampire (reviewed here) and Shiver Of The Vampires (reviewed here). Although it’s not my favourite of his movies, it’s probably the one with my favourite opening sequence because it’s like a bizarre, non-sequitur of a back story fill in and, I appreciate the strange juxtaposition of elements presented in this imagery. It’s also one of his more problematic films for the British Board Of Film Censors as it’s always cut to ribbons over here by at least six minutes, due to the sexual violence and dungeon molestation scenes so... yeah... if you’ve not seen this and want to watch it, make sure you definitely ‘don’t buy British’ in this case. Get a nice American or French version.

Okay... so that opening sequence. Shots are being fired as two cars speed down a country lane, one in pursuit of the other. The front car is being driven by a guy with two female companions who are dressed and made up as clowns. One of the two women... and of course it’s two women because two female companions is one of Rollin’s main obsessions in his movies... is firing out the back of the car window. They manage to give their aggressive pursuers the slip by turning down a back lane but it’s too late for the driver... he has taken too many bullets. So the girls drive the car to the middle of a field, cover it and the driver in gasoline and catch it alight. Once again, Rollin gives us a strong, slightly surreal, visual image of a car burning in a field. We cut to the opening credits which picture the girls walking through the countryside as Pierre Raph’s passable score kicks in.

Various small things happen which take up the first half an hour. The two girls, Marie (played by Marie-Pierre Castel, from Shiver Of The Vampires) and Michelle (played by Mireille Dargent, who would appear in a few of the director’s next films), find a barn and change out of their clown attire and make up. They then find a motorcycle in a tower which, I think, the driver pointed them to prior to his death (if I am joining the dots correctly), before using sexual allure to distract a hot dog stand vendor so they can steal his money but then, one of them gets accidentally buried alive by an inattentive grave digger (don’t ask). However, she is rescued before the two stumble onto a river, with some blood dripping in it and come face to face with some bats in a forest which compel them to find their way to a castle. The rest of the movie is pretty simple too and here’s a quick summary...

In the castle they find a vampire cult lead by the half vampire Erica (played by Dominique, the pointy breast stabbing woman from Shiver Of The Vampires) and Louise (played by Louise Dhour). They also have some barbaric male companions who do lots of raping and molestation of both Marie and Michelle, plus a load of chained, naked girls in the dungeon, in scenes which do go on a bit, it has to be said. These vampire guys also all manage to sound like Robert Newton playing Long John Silver as they make piratey ‘Arrrr’ noises as their only form of communication, it seems to me. Then there’s the one they all worship, the old vampire (played by Michel Delesalle) who has bitten them all... they are supposedly all turning into vampires and Erica even has fangs now.  

Then there’s lots of shenanigans where the two girls find that they can’t escape the grounds of the castle and the nearby cemetery (which looks familiar, it may be the one from The Iron Rose, reviewed here) as they always end back up at the castle. Their new job now is to entice nearby, local men into the castle for food. The double pigtailed Michelle takes her chores seriously... well, I say seriously. She finds a local, takes her clothes off and then the two of them chase each other laughing through the castle during many extended scenes as silly, comedy music plays. These scenes are nice to look at but, alas, they genuinely give a Carry On feel to the whole sequence, which is at odds with the rest of the movie.

These scenes are crosscut to Marie having sex with a guy but she hides him from the vampire cult. This gets her in trouble but the old vampire, in a candid moment with Marie, tells her that the others won’t properly turn into vampires and he really is the last of his breed. This makes no sense in some ways because, in the protracted dungeon rape scene, one of the barbaric males turns into a bat and hangs from a woman’s hair covered vulva in a nicely surreal, typical piece of Rollin image making. So, yeah, never sacrifice a good image for the details of the plot is probably the order of the day here (much like Argento, who admits to having the same disregard of the plot mechanics when it comes to being faced with a striking visual). But then, Michelle chains naked Marie up in a tower and whips her, in order to find out where her lover is. Marie won’t tell but Michelle then escapes with her because Erica was going to stab her eye out. Then the head vampire sacrifices his and Erica’s life by being sealed in a guarded tomb by his followers and the camera ‘irises in’ as the screen shrinks to a circle surrounded by orange.

So yeah, the story is simple and a lot of the acting is... questionable. But it’s Rollin so you come to expect that. As it’s Rollin, though, you also get a film filled with memorable and haunting images and a lot of beautifully composed frames. Once again, the director's use of colour is astonishing and, like in Shiver Of The Vampires, he sometimes pitches different colours like reds and blues together, colour coding different depths of the set to separate foreground and background in contrasting hues.

He’s also not shy of occasionally shocking the viewer with the juxtaposition of colours between transitions. For example, the shot of the vampire bat drinking the blood direct from a chained woman’s genitalia is all lit in red and held in the shot for a while. Then we get an edit to the old vampire in his coffin and... it’s a all lit in a bright, fluorescent green reminiscent of the greens that Mario Bava used to use in similar ways in his movies. It’s a shock to the senses, in the best way and looks fantastic, of course (well, Rollin’s cinema always looks fantastic).

Another thing he does a lot of here is take shots looking at different levels to add depth. So he’ll have an opening in a part of the screen with people framed in that opening to highlight the contrasting depths. Or he’ll take a shot from up on the ramparts looking down at several different landscape levels with the action going on in the bottom level. And, conversely, he’ll do a shot looking up from the bottom of a tower at a naked lady at the top, for instance. I notice he really makes use of the height and horizontal lengths of various locations here, probably more than he did in the previous film because this castle lends itself to that kind of frame design.

Also, in this film, some of the night scenes give a completely pitch black screen where nothing can be seen except the shapes or areas he chooses to highlight with his coloured lighting. So, for example, a tomb in the grave yard taking up about an eighth of the screen near the middle of a shot is the only thing the eye has to latch on to... and he does this several times throughout the movie with different objects such as grave yard markers or crypt entrances. The final shot of the movie where the camera becomes just a circle on the screen surrounded by orange further enhances the shot where that kind of dark and light visibility was already going on in the frame... which is a nice moment, even though it’s the end.

The film, like a few of Rollin’s movies, doesn’t end well for the vampires but, at least in this one, the two main female leads survive and escape their vampiric fate which, well, I don’t remember Rollin’s films always ending this optimistically... although, if your sympathies are for the vampire and his hopeful cult, then I guess it possibly doesn’t. Like all of Rollin’s films, Requiem For A Vampire is, if nothing else, an absolutely beautiful, rich visual compendium of surreal and sexy, gothic hued imagery which, frankly, should be of interest to any cinephile worth their salt. Not one of my favourites but still a key work and certainly brilliant enough that I could watch it fairly regularly (I must have seen this one at least five times by now). And, to date (although there’s a beautiful Encore DVD set of this film which is also worth having, for just the packaging alone if nothing else), the US Redemption Blu Ray version is the best transfer available... so maybe give that one a go if you have a multizone machine.

The Raven (1935)

Surgeon On The Rocks

The Raven
USA 1935
Directed by Lew Landers
Universal/Eureka Masters Of  Cinema
Three Edgar Allan Poe Films of Bela Lugosi
Blu Ray Set Zone B

Warning: As of some spoiler gently spoiling, spoilering at my chamber door.

So it was time for me to revisit, courtesy of Eureka Masters Of Cinema’s Blu Ray edition of three Bela Lugosi films adapted from the works of Edgar Allan Poe... Lugosi and Boris Karloff’s follow up to their successful pairing in The Black Cat (reviewed here). The Raven is, once again, one of the many Edgar Allan Poe works which really can’t be translated into something cinematic all that well and, despite the number of films with the same title made over the decades (which claim to be just that)... well... The Raven is a poem for starters. Which is just another abstract thing which allows movie makers purporting to adapt it to just do their own thing with the mention of the original material before going over to their own narrative. This one, in the opening credits, says that it’s “Suggested by Edgar Allan Poe’s immortal classic” and, yeah, I guess that’s about as honest a credit as you’re going to get for one of these.

The film starts off with a famous dancer, Jean (played by Irene Ware), crashing her car off a cliff edge and then laying comatose in hospital, at deaths door. Her father, Judge Thatcher (played by Samuel S. Hinds... you know, George Bailey’s dad in It’s A Wonderful Life, reviewed here) insists that the genius Doctor Vollin, played by Bela Lugosi, is brought out of retirement against his will, to save the life of his daughter. He does and, although Jean is due to marry Jerry (played by Lester Matthews), Vollin becomes infatuated with her, despite the disapproval of her father (and with her not realising he is serious in his pursuit of a younger woman).

Then, a criminal on the run, Bateman (played by Boris Karloff, somehow sneaking top billing and billed only as Karloff) tries to force Vollin to alter his appearance. Vollin does so, by cutting the nerves on the back of Bateman's neck, leaving him with a grotesque appearance of a slipping rubber eyeball and slack mouth in what is, frankly, the most laughable makeup I’ve ever seen by the master of the craft, Jack Pearce. In order for Vollin to change Bateman’s appearance to something more appealing, he blackmails him into helping him ‘take care’ of Jean, Jerry and the Judge in a dinner party at his secluded house. There, he tries to kill all his guests with torture devices which he has constructed himself, said to be inspired by the work of Poe but, by this time Bateman himself has fallen for the charms of the girl and helps everyone to escape, crushing the mad Vollin in a chamber with slow closing walls.

It’s a fairly mean spirited film, it has to be said. Not exactly a horror film at all but this didn’t stop the BBFC in the UK using it as an excuse to not allow anymore horror films to be imported into the country for a while. Karloff plays a kind of anti-hero character quite well and Lugosi plays the whole ‘mad doctor’ bit to the hilt, squeezing every drop of insanity out of the role. So from an acting point of view, it’s business as usual from Universal with, you know, ‘a good cast that’s worth repeating’ all round.

That being said, even though there’s no real connection to the story by Edgar Allan Poe, it really does try quite hard to justify it’s title. For instance, when the audience first meets Lugosi’s character, he is sitting by the side of the shadow of his stuffed raven, reciting the words of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem in his own, phonetically learned manner. And it turns out his character has the biggest collection of Poe memorabilia in his house, the envy of other collectors. And, as a surprise to Vollin for saving her life, Jean dances in a ballet sequence based on Poe’s The Raven, with an actor even done up to look like the writer on stage with her at one point.

The last section of the film, dealing with Vollin’s hand built torture chamber and the ‘guests’ he has trapped there has, at its centre piece the slowly descending, pendulum knife from Poe’s The Pit And The Pendulum and, since it so dominates certain scenes of this movie, I have to say I’m surprised that this wasn’t also the title used for this movie. Especially since the last film made with that title prior to this one was all the way back in 1913. So, yeah, not quite sure why that didn’t happen but, well, at least Vollin has a stuffed raven so, yeah, there’s some small tie-in at least. And, at one point, Vollin does try and shoehorn his situation into the famous poem somehow, although it really doesn’t fit things all that well.

And I don’t have much more to say about The Raven, to be honest. The black and white photography, shot design and lighting are all quite stark and interesting, as many films of this era and, if you like the Flash Gordon serials, well a load of the music in this was tracked into the first serial a year later (and reviewed by me here). If you like the old Universal classic monsters, well... aside from not having any real monsters in it and not being a strict horror movie, The Raven is definitely in the same vein and something you should maybe take a look at. Eureka’s new three movie set of this, gathered together with The Black Cat and Murders In The Rue Morgue (reviewed here) is definitely the best I’ve seen these movies looking and, if this is your kind of thing, it's worth the upgrade, for sure.

Stranger Things 4

Ex-stranging
The Experience

Stranger Things 4
USA May - July 2022
Nine episodes

Warning: Some spoilers running right up that hill at you.

Okay, it has to be said that series four of hit show Stranger Things was a little bit hit and miss for me. I didn’t like it as much as the second and third series, for sure but, I still liked it a lot better than the first. That being said, there’s lots of good stuff within it too so... let’s take a little look.

Okay, plot...  it’s Spring Break and various characters are reunited, after the close of the last season meant that some of them had to move away from the sleepy town of Hawkins. Something, though, is killing high school kids in Hawkins, making them see dark visions for a week or so in advance... before levitating them into the air, breaking their bones and then sucking their eyeballs back into their head. However, as with other seasons, the plot strands are split both globally and in terms of character threads, into three or four different groups, which merge and then diverge over the series. You have one lot trying to figure out what’s going on with the bizarre murders that look very much like they come from the Upside Down (the physical manifestation of the alternate, dark version of Hawkins where all the dark things dwell), you have Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) being retrained (through ordeal) to recover her superpowers by both Mathew Modine and Paul Reiser, themselves pursued by an army splinter group, because they believe Eleven is the only way to stop what is coming to Hawkins. You also have three of the kids trying to recover Eleven (along with new stoner character Argyle) and we have Joyce (Winona Ryder) finding out that Hopper (David Harbour) may still be alive after the events of the last series finale but, needs assistance to help break him out of a Russian security prison in Alaska. And, of course, the series concludes with all the characters reuniting but, things go a little differently this time around.

Okay, so lots to like here. The playing of a Dungeons And Dragons game crosscut with a basketball game is pretty well done. There’s a nod to the famous real life Hellfire Club (although mostly just in the name used for a D&D group) and, being as it’s set in 1986, the usual pop culture artefacts such as an Elvira poster, a Halloween mask and, in a series of moments which surprised everyone in terms of the spin off benefits... using the Kate Bush song Running Up That Hill as Max’s (Sadie Sink) favourite song, used to save her life and pull her away from the clutches of the creature at one point midway through the season, resulting in it being number one in the world charts for weeks (and still counting at time of writing). I remember when this song came out in 1985... it turned me on to Kate Bush big time and within the space of about six weeks I’d saved up enough money to purchase all of her albums, of which there were then five in total. Of course, in those days they were vinyl albums but they were certainly among the first non-soundtrack titles I upgraded to CD when the format was introduced.

Another great pop culture moment is when the kids are trying to find a drug supplier by only his first name. The two who work in a video store run it into their computer and narrow it down to about seven people in the area before checking the rental records... when they find the one who keeps renting out all the Cheech And Chong videos, they know they’ve got their man. And Dustin quoting Han Solo in normal conversation (Never tell me the odds!) was a nice touch. Not to mention the casting of Freddy himself, Robert Englund (from the Nightmare On Elm Street films... which don’t really appeal to me, I remember him best in V), as a key character in one episode.

Another thing I liked about the show was that the main villain turns out to be someone from Eleven’s past (she’s repressed the memory for so long) and, not only that, it turns out he’s the prime mover for the villains in all three previous seasons. I also liked that, although it seems for a little while that the day has been saved by the usual suspects... there’s one important character left in a coma and, as the Upside Down has ruptured Hawkins in various multidimensional rifts... well, it starts snowing that kind of ash that is in the air in the Upside Down... it’s clear the kids aren’t out of the woods yet...

Although I really thought they would be because, well, I was under the impression that the fourth series was the final one for the show but, no, it turns out that there’s going to be a fifth and final season at some point and, all I will say about that is, they’d better get their skates on. Those kids are growing up fast and when you compare them to flashback footage from previous iterations, it’s really noticeable. The other thing about that is... usually a year has gone by with each new show but... I just don’t see how they’re going to be able to pick up the storyline again without carrying on from exactly where they left it this time around. Which makes getting it in the can even more urgent, I would have thought.

Talking about the music though... there’s a thing about the needle drop of pre-existing tracks that I really didn’t like. Namely the way they’ve been cut up and looped about. For example, would it have killed them to cut the big Kate Bush scene (out of the many in the show using that song) to the actual track as it exists rather than keep chopping it about like that? And in one long scene where the villain is monologuing for quite a while, the music seems to start off with the last track from Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi score before, bizarrely, jumping into his opera Akhnaten midway through. Not quite sure what’s going on there.

All in all, though, like I said, I still appreciated Stranger Things 4 more than the first season and I have the two volumes of score CD (not the stupid song compilations) on pre-order (which at two discs each makes it the most music we’ve had from a season in one hit). So if you liked the other three seasons you should probably be okay with this one. I’m kind of hoping that Season 5 will be a marked improvement though... and I hope they continue to bring Kate Bush along for the ride.

S + Ship Of Theseus

 







Margin
For Error

S
by Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams
Canongate Books
ISBN: 9780857864772
incorporating
Ship Of Theseus by V. M. Straka
(Winged Shoe Press, New York, 1949)

S, by Doug Dorst and director J. J Abrams, is a curious and extremely interesting proposition of a book. You will only find the title of the book on the handsome slipcover... a big, black S spot varnished onto a black cover and a small seal of paper on which is printed other details such as the identity of the two authors. And then, as soon as you break this seal to pull the tome within from the slipcase, you are embarking on an adventure which, well it may not lead you to an easy resolution but it will certainly hold your interest throughout. The actual book you will find inside is not called S at all. It is Ship Of Theseus, the final work of a reclusive mystery man of an author called V. M. Straka. An author who very few people ever met or knew and who died falling, with torn pages from a manuscript in his pocket. As did, we are told, many people in real life who were possibly part of a faction of revolutionaries involved in bombings on behalf of a group called the S. Or possibly they were not but this is pertinent because it is one of the mysteries to be solved, not on the printed word on the page of Ship Of Theseus, but by the two people, Eric and Jen, who leave the book for each other in a safe place and explore the mysteries of the tome, with good purpose, to the point where their lives are in danger... and whose story you will read from the many notes in different coloured inks which they leave in the big, scholar’s margins of the book.

And, you really do have to be careful how you open this one... and how you read it. Because the book itself is a deliberately distressed tome (distressed right back to 1949) and the two readers whose adventure you are sharing, don’t just leave various notes in all the margins as you watch them try to come closer to the hidden codes which Straka... and the woman who he loves but has never met, who is writing the English translation and leaving her own footnotes... as they unearth and hide in public the various injustices and crimes which the S were, possibly, fighting against. Not just notes, you see but loads of paraphernalia such as postcards, letters to each other or from various people locked into the Straka mystery, photographs, a code wheel (if you are cleverer than I as to where various clues about hidden codes in the book are hidden and what they say)... and even a wonderfully reproduced napkin on just the right kind of paper, where a map has been drawn by Eric to show Jen the secret ways in the tunnels under the University campus which houses the library where they leave this book for each other... to kickstart their own romance which does, it has to be said, have some parallels between Straka and his translator.

The story in Ship Of Theseus itself is really quite an abstract tale of a man called S, who doesn’t know who he is and spends many years in distorted time on the titular ship where he writes, stitches his own lips together with thread (as most of the crew do) and goes ashore in various towns to commits acts of assassination and terrorism... all the while trying to find out why he has been chosen for this life which he doesn’t understand and to find the woman who he thinks he loves... which is a metaphor again for the fictional Straka and his translator.

Of the handwritten (but obviously printed, quite convincingly on the yellowing paper of this dusty tome) notes from Jen and Eric... well, after a while you will realise that they are reading and re-reading to get more clues and ideas as to where they are going, in an effort to beat Eric’s ex-tutor in getting out a book unveiling the actual identity of V. M. Straka before Eric does the same. And each time they make another pass, the inks change colour so they can see the new notes to each other in the relevant places. Which is nice because you end up getting three parts of their story developing at the same time as you read the notes highlighting or starting from certain passages in the book from different points in their growing romantic relationship. It’s kinda cool.

And it has some really nice touches as you read through... not just the obvious Ship Of Theseus thought experiment which is actually highlighted as a metaphor in the book by the constant rebuilding of the ship over years. Such as a moment, which truly terrifies both readers, is when it turns out the little handwritten ‘S’ symbols, aping the ones that have started appearing... along with arson attacks... around campus and near Jen’s home, have not been drawn in the book by either one of them. And, of course, because the characters as represented by their notes to each other are scared by this, you as a reader become concerned too. It’s a lovely idea for a book but, all I will say is don’t read it when you are likely to doze off. I did this once and one of the many artefacts dropped out from the pages. Luckily it was one I’d already read but even then, it took me ten minutes or more to figure out which page it was supposed to be slotted into and only then because that specific artefact was referenced in Jen and Eric’s notes to each other (not all of them are).

My one real problem with the book is the ending. I liked the actual Ship Of Theseus tale well enough. It’s very much in the style of a piece of classical contemporary literature of the year in which the real writers purport it was written and it does have a definitive ending of sorts. My real problem was the conclusion of Jen and Eric’s tale. While that also has an ending, it doesn’t spell anything out for the reader and the central mysteries which spurred the collaboration of these two ‘reader characters’ are never really answered. Perhaps if I’d been clever enough to actually figure out the codes... left in the footnotes by the translator sometimes as small dots by some letters (it will take you a while to get your eye in on these) or the occasional raised letter... I may have been able to figure it out. I’m guessing not, actually but, you know... maybe.

Even though the ending of S was less a revelatory moment and more a celebration of two people finding love between the lines of an ‘old’ piece of literature... I have to say I really enjoyed the journey* and, as much of a cliché as it is to say it, the journey was much more the point of the thing, I feel, than the actual destination of either of the parallel stories depicted in the book. So, in spite of the end game of the book, I thoroughly enjoyed the telling of the tale and I would thoroughly recommend this one to my more literary friends who are maybe looking for something a little different to read, regardless of whether it has a more concrete resolution or not (and maybe some will see one where I did not... I may just have been losing IQ points by the end of my journey through the double narrative). So yeah, great looking book and a satisfying journey from start to finish. Liked this one a lot.

*and now I know what words like leptorrhine (The Shadow should know that one), fricative and panjandrum mean... although goodness knows if I will ever use any of them in a sentence ever. Or maybe, yeah, maybe I just did.

Return Of The 18 Bronzemen

Bronzed Expectations

Return Of The
18 Bronzemen
aka Yong zheng da
po shi ba tong ren
Taiwan/Hong Kong 1976
Directed by Joseph Kuo
Eureka Masters Of Cinema
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Bronze spoilers leaping at you.

Return Of The 18 Bronzemen is the eighth and final of the films presented as part of Eureka’s brilliant Cinematic Vengeance - Joseph Kuo boxed edition and, wow, what an odd little movie. Dates are sketchy indeed for the original Taiwanese release of this movie but, certainly in Hong Kong, this sequel was released in cinemas a couple of weeks before the first film. Yeah, don’t ask why because I don’t know but I’ve seen this phenomenon happen a few times, especially in countries where the movie didn’t have it’s first release yet (so, for example, Dario Argento’s Deep Red was released in Japan after the success of Suspiria and under the title Suspiria 2, if you can believe that... never mind that, as far as these unconnected films go, Suspiria is a horror movie and Deep Red is a giallo).

But yeah, despite the bizarre release dates, this film is a very strange affair. It starts off with a young prince, played by Carter Wong, who seizes the throne under a ruse and who is shown to be not a very nice guy. Then, when he hears of a revolt in the famous Shaolin Temple depicted in the first movie, he goes into an extended flashback which lasts the majority of the film, to his youth. After getting into a fight which he loses against a kung fu lady played by Polly Ling-Feng Shang-Kuan, who played a different but major role in the first movie (reviewed here), he then comes into conflict with another young man played by Peng Tien, who played the hero of the first movie. This is literally the only scene that Tien is in for the whole film. The prince loses this fight too, which spurs him onto devising a way into the Shaolin Temple and ‘charming’ the monks to allow him to study for three years.

Okay, so most of the rest of the movie (I would guess a good hour) is just him enduring hardships and taking the 18 Bronzemen test three times (it’s interesting that he doesn’t have to pass the tests of the 36 Chambers in this film, as the hero of the last one did). And it’s quite good kung fu action which serves to show off the fighting skills of the lead actor. The Bronzemen challenges are somewhat similar but upgraded somewhat from the first movie and, all in all, the film looks better and the plot is less scrappy than the last one, it has to be said (I think I definitely preferred this one). After failing twice, he undergoes the trials for a third time but doesn’t get the double brands for moving the cauldron away from the Gate Of Heaven as, just as he’s about to pass the very last challenge, the head monk figures out he’s really a prince and expels him after his three years there because, as he says, the monks do not partake in affairs of the state.

Basically, we’re asked to watch a villain in training as the film unfolds... which is an odd one but, of course in a Western film, this would serve to build up the villain’s powers so we can see him defeated against all odds by whoever the hero turns out to be. But, yeah, this doesn’t happen... the flashback ends and, literally within the space of the last ten minutes and now back to being Emperor, he survives a kung fu assassination attempt by Polly Ling-Feng Shang-Kuan in her second and final, short appearance in the movie and then orders his men to go and kill all the monks (as apparently happened in real life) with a new flying guillotine machine... which we don’t see in action although I believe some Shaw Brothers movie have got that one covered. Instead, he gives the order of their destruction and... that’s it. The end of the movie. The villain triumphs over the powers of good and, presumably, Buddha, in a strange twist to the way these things usually go in kung fu movies. Although, of course, this is absolutely typical for the majority of the films in this boxed set, which almost all seem to end in either a pyrrhic victory or, as here, just total failure of anyone with good character. So, yeah, this is a really curious subset of films that Eureka, Masters Of Cinema have put out, for sure.

One interesting point in the movie, when the villain first goes to the Shaolin Temple and is refused, is that he sits in the rain for a few days and waits them out until they accept him. One wonders if the writers of Marvel’s first MCU Doctor Strange movie had seen this or, if not this one (Taiwanese kung fu films seem to be treated as poor, unworthy cousins to their Hong Kong rivals, as I’m beginning to find out), then certainly some other which applies a similar cliché.

And, yeah, another short review I’m afraid but that’s about all I have to say on Return Of The 18 Bronzemen other than, I found it hugely enjoyable with the almost non-stop fighting scenes... even though, it would be true to say, the audience finds themselves in the unenviable position of rooting for the villain throughout the majority of the movie. Which is strange but, hey, that’s the power of the well edited movie, I guess. Asides from the incredibly hasty and negative ending to the picture, this is a nice one to end the boxed edition with, I think.
 

Thor - Love And Thunder

From Her To Eternity

Thor - Love And Thunder
Australia/USA  2022
Directed by Taika Waititi
UK Cinema Release Print.

Warning: Electrifying spoilers within.

Right then. This is going to be a fairly short review, I think. Not because I didn’t like Thor - Love And Thunder... on the contrary, I loved it... but because it’s really hard, sometimes, to come up with things to say when the movie you’ve just watched is damn near perfect in every way. Now I know I’m in the minority here, judging by talk on the internet... and I know a lot of people didn’t like Eternals either (another truly great Marvel movie, which I reviewed here). I do find a lot of Marvel films a bit hit and miss, to be honest but, seriously, I think this new Thor may be the best movie from Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) as it stands so far. When Marvel get things right... they really get things right.

Okay, so this one is something you can watch without having seen any of the recent Marvel movies after Avengers Endgame. After a brilliant prologue, where we see the origins of the film’s main villain, Gorr The God Butcherer, played by Christian Bale, this one starts off properly as Endgame left things. We have Thor tagging along with the Guardians Of The Galaxy and a wonderful and very strong set up scene which sees Thor inheriting two, giant, screaming space goats. I kept thinking to myself... this is such a strong opening, it’s got to go down hill from here... but no. The movie just keeps going from strength to strength as we have two initial separate story strands starting off... one being Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Kevin (director Taika Waititi back as the comic relief rock creature) leaving the Guardians with the quest of finding the God killer, a trail that leads them back to new Asgard.

Meanwhile, Thor’s ex-girlfriend Jane Foster (played once again by Natalie Portman) is dying of stage four cancer. While trying to fight this, she is called by the shattered remains of Thor’s old hammer Mjonir, in New Asgard, which reassembles itself and turns her into a female version of Thor. But when she doesn’t have the hammer and she reverts back to her Jane Foster alter ego, she still finds herself dying of cancer. So, everybody suddenly finds themselves back at New Asgard on Earth, ruled over by Valkyrie (once again played by Tessa Thompson) when Gorr attacks but fails to kill them... he does, however, kidnap all the children as bait for Thor and his gang, so he can obtain Thor’s second hammer, Stormbreaker, which will allow him to gain access to the character of Eternity. Now, Eternity looks pretty much like he did in the comics but, Marvel are mixing thing up again since he was not originally a Thor character but a character from the original Doctor Strange strip... Eternity making his debut there in Strange Tales Issue 138.

And there you have it. There’s lots of good stuff happening in this and it’s mostly, pretty much, played as high comedy again, with even Matt Damon and Sam Neill returning as the Asgardian actors portraying Loki and Odin. That being said, there’s a warm beating heart at the film’s centre in the rekindled relationship building between Thor and Jane but, even a moment of high tragedy near the end of the movie, is still seen as pretty much upbeat the way it’s played here by the director. Although it’s simultaneously quite brutal and pulls the rug from under audience members like myself, who can see the solution to the big problem at the heart of the movie being put together piece by piece, only to have it taken away at the eleventh hour (but stay for the second of the post credits scenes to give a little more closure to the fate of one of the characters, for sure).

Another high comedy moment is when Thor and co go to Omnipotence City (where all the Gods hang out and plan for their big orgy)... in order to raise an army. I’m not exactly a fan of Russel Crowe but he does a pretty good, comical version of Zeus for this film, it has to be said.

And, yeah, that’s pretty much all I’ve got to say on this one, for the reasons explained in my opening paragraph (Katrin, if you’re reading this one backwards again, please jump to the beginning for closure on this sentence). Thor - Love And Thunder, like the previous Thor movie Ragnarok, wallows in its own levity and tears down the comic book gatekeepers of this world while still respecting the material on which it is based and managing to be completely entertaining in the process. It’s not hyperbole when I say that this is probably the best stand alone Thor movie yet... and I love the bit at the end which says, Thor will return... like he’s James Bond or Fu Manchu. Nice movie, not deserving of the critical drubbing it’s gotten in any way shape or form (indeed, I saw it at a screening with a fairly small audience but there was a round of applause when the credits started to role). Don't miss this one.

The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent

The Discreet Charm
Of Being Nic Cage

The Unbearable Weight
Of Massive Talent
USA 2022
Directed by Tom Gormican
Lionsgate

Warning: Unbearable amount of massive spoilerage.

You know, despite my initial, allergic reactions to the actor in the 1980s and 1990s (well, apart from his essential performance in Wild At Heart, obviously), I‘ve grown to appreciate and enjoy the work of Nicolas Cage much more over the last 15 years or so and he’s definitely been on fire for the last few years, with outrageously flamboyant roles in stuff like Mandy (reviewed here), Colour Out Of Space (reviewed here) and Willy’s Wonderland (reviewed here) coming out alongside movies like Pig (reviewed here), undoubtedly one of the greatest movies of recent years. Even so, when a movie paraphrases the title of a famous Milan Kundera novel (and subsequent movie adaptation) like The Unbearable Lightness Of Being and promotes Nicolas Cage playing a version of himself, even I am going to get warning signs that maybe this might not be such a great idea.

That being said, though, I’d have to say that The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent is something of a minor masterpiece of modern, self referential cinema and I was really surprised that they managed to get to something both as polished and as witty as this into cinemas.

The plot sees Nicolas Cage on the rocks in terms of getting decent new roles and having problems with his daughter (due to his ego mainly) and his ex-wife. Then he gets a call and he goes to Spain to be at the birthday of ‘super fan’ Javi, played by Pedro Pascal... a gig which he takes for the money but, surprisingly, he hits it off with him and the two develop a bond. However, the CIA assume that Javi, who is perceived as the local drug cartel kingpin, has kidnapped the local president’s daughter and so they employ Cage to try and help them rescue her and stop Javi. Things aren’t quite as simple though and various humorous shenanigans follow as the reality of the situation is made clear and it’s finally down to Cage, his ex-wife and Javi to rescue both the president’s daughter and Cage’s own daughter, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, from the real kingpin.

And it’s great.

It’s got a nice sense of pacing and atmosphere in different sections of the movie too, where it goes from a comedic look at the nature of art and the way it affects the players behind and in front of the screen in Holllywoodland, switching to a male bonding comedy before going into full on action comedy mode for the last half hour.

And it’s full of cool moments (such as when Cage is in conversation or even assaulted by himself in a younger guise in his imagination, at various points) to great throwaway lines such as the fact his daughter thought Humphrey Bogart was a porn star. There’s even a crazy LSD sequence where Cage and Pascal do the old comedy warhorse of two people trying to escape and get over a wall when, in reality, they could have just quickly walked around it... and they actually get away with it and pull it off because the two actors have great on-screen chemistry. Which is nice... yeah, these two should do another couple of movies together.

My favourite moment is when Cage asks Javi what his three favourite films are and he comes up with Face Off (not one of my favourites), The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari (should be one of everyone’s favourites, surely?) and, the movie which forever changed his life and made him want to be a better person... Paddington 2 (reviewed here). And right there, is why this film is so brilliant, as Cage ridicules him but then is made to watch it and realises that it’s a truly great movie... the big comedy sparks which, although blatantly ridiculous, also hide a pearl of truth within the idea. Because, after all, Paddington 2 is a pretty moving movie (perhaps not quite as cool as the first one but it’s a close call, for sure).

However, comedy acting, intelligent dialogue and sheer entertainment value aside, the film is also amazingly well put together. The director does that thing where he uses sets and various things to reflect a verticality to split the shots into delineated sections but, also combines that with a camera point of view that kind of moves you towards that kind of composition. So you approach something from the side and then suddenly you are in a perfectly beautiful looking, symmetrical shot set up. He even has the vehicle that Cage and Javi are driving at one point as an open top car with big vertical sides leading to where a canopy might go over, so he can even expand that vertical aesthetic into the high speed car chase scenes too... it’s blindingly good stuff, I have to say.

I know Cage turned this movie down a good three or four times before finally being persuaded to accept playing himself in The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent and I can certainly see why he would have been reluctant to send himself up... or rather the perceived and totally false, off screen hyper-personae which he represents to many of his fans (I’m sure)... but I’m really glad Cage finally caved on that decision because I think this one is about as well handled a version of that exploration as there could be and, yeah, it’s overwhelmingly entertaining throughout its full running time, even if you are somewhat ahead of the plot on occasion (don’t expect too many surprises... it’s not that kind of film). I’m definitely glad I saw this and will certainly revisit it at some point.

Swedish Sensationsfilms

Blue
Swede
Views

Swedish
Sensationsfilms
by Daniel Ekeroth
Bazillion Points Books
ISBN: 9780979616365

Daniel Ekeroth’s book Swedish Sensationsfilms is a cool but somewhat puzzling tome, it seems to me. I bought it because Swedish cinema is a large gap in my personal film knowledge, asides from the usual stuff by the likes of Bergman and, of course, Thriller (aka They Call Her One Eye), which obviously features prominently in this book. But along the way there were certainly some surprising things in terms of the questions the book gives rise to, once it’s dealt a small overview of the subject, beginning with the formation, in 1911, of Sweden’s National Board Of Film Classification, which was apparently the world’s first state sponsored film censors.

Okay, so for one, I’ve never heard of any Swedish exploitation films (including all the usual suspects) as being termed Sensationsfilms. It seems to me almost something that Ekeroth has made up as a new attempt to catalogue and lump the varying films into one collective genre (indeed, the back cover blurb cites other country’s genres such as Giallo and Ozploitation as an example of the usefulness of such a category. I may be wrong on that count, of course... it may just be a Swedish term for these kinds of movies?

Another thing of slighty head scratching magnitude is the subtitle of the book... “A Clandestine History of Sex, Thrillers And Kicker Cinema”... I mean what the heck is ‘Kicker’ cinema, right? Well that one certainly, if I’m to believe the author (and I’ve no reason not to... he writes extremely well), is some kind of Swedish term for... if I’m getting this right... a generation of youths who used to like to gather on the streets of Sweden and kick the heck out of phone boxes, stray people and each other. Which, frankly, seems to me a tenuous term or idea on which to base a sub genre of a specific genre I already wasn’t sure about in terms of it’s title but, hey, I don’t really care about that much because, as I said, the book is extremely well written.

It starts off with a short history of the rise of what the writer calles the Swedish Sensationsfilms and then we get another introduction chapter called Christina Lindberg, Exposed, where Lindberg tells of her early days starting out as a photospread model while still in school and then ‘playing hooky’ (or bunking off lessons, as we might say over here... although I sadly never did that myself) so she could shoot her first sexy movie, Maid In Sweden (as it’s best known in the West).

These two sections are then followed by the lengthy section which takes up 95% of the book, which is a page dedicated to all of the ‘Swedish Sensationsfilms’ which this writer has collected together (and I can only assume that this is the total of the films able to be labelled up as such under this generic banner... which is way less than I thought but still a sizeable chunk). It’s in this section that you’ll learn things like the film Kärlekend Spräk (Language of Love) from 1969, by Torgny Wickman, is the movie that Travis Bickle takes Betsy to see as his ‘date movie’ in Scorcese’s Taxi Driver.

Following this, there is a Glossary Of Curious Swedish Culture where certain terms, countries and areas are explained... I especially liked the section on Danmark (or Denmark as it is known over here) where the author informs us that “Danish is basically Swedish, spoken by an extremely drunk person with a hot potato in his mouth.” Yeah, I must admit I did admire the author of this one and some of the eloquent conclusions and turns of phrase he utilised as he mustered judgement on a load of, if I’m judging this right, mostly garbage movies with not much in the way of redeeming features.

After this there’s a Rogue’s Gallery section where various filmmakers of these titles, from both behind and in front of the camera, are given a few paragraphs of information, followed by a brief Acknowledgments section and then a final section called Twenty Sensationsfilms To See Before You Die... which is kinda self explanatory and I’m glad the writer did all the work for us here.

That being said, I was expecting to come away with absolutely shed loads of films I’d not previously heard of to hunt out in some form or another but, sadly, because the writer is fairly negative about a lot of them (not deliberately so, I suspect, in some cases), I only came away with a list of two... Mannekäng I Rött (aka Mannequin In Red, which is supposed to be a Swedish forerunner to the giallo) and Space Invasion In Lapland... neither of which were good enough for the writer to single out in his final section, it has to be said.

However, I have to say that although I haven’t found myself armed with the usual long list of future cinematic conquests, I did find the author’s style of writing hugely entertaining and he obviously knows a lot about his subject (as he happily frittered away his life watching dreck like this). So, yeah, I found Swedish Sensationsfilms to be an invaluable addition, in some ways, to the cinematic bookshelf and if you’ve a hankering to know more about Swedish exploitation cinema then this is maybe a good place to start. Have a look sometime.

The Falcon In Hollywood

Nitrate Death Rate

The Falcon In Hollywood
USA 1944
Directed by Gordon Douglas
RKO/Warner Archive DVD Region 1

Well here we have another interesting diversion in the successful Falcon series for RKO pictures. The Falcon In Hollywood is directed by none other than Gordon Douglas, one of those interesting American directors whose name comes up often associated with some quality films such as the second of the Flint movies, the Tony Rome movies, westerns such as the brilliant Rio Conchos (reviewed by me here) and not forgetting the classic giant ant movie THEM!

This one must have been fairly cheap to produce for RKO since, apart from the opening sequence set at the races and a brief interlude set in a deserted sports stadium, the whole of the film is pretty much set on the RKO back lot and, apparently, it still looks pretty much the same now as it did then. In the opening scene of the movie, we are introduced to a new Detective Inspector played by Emory Parnell and his sidekick played by Frank Jenks. I guess neither of these characters were considered strong enough to return to the franchise in a regular fashion as their predecessors had but, Parnell does reappear in another Falcon movie later as another character. They’re on the trail of an ex-con who The Falcon testified against, played by Sheldon Leonard (the ‘giving out wings’ guy from It’s A Wonderful Life) and they look up The Falcon, aka Tom Lawrence (once again played by Tom Conway) to see if he knows where he is.

Following on from a mix up with a couple of women and a bag, The Falcon finds himself travelling to the film studios with an over eager taxi cab driver, reflecting the wartime spirit of ‘jobs for gals’ by being a lady. She also becomes The Falcon’s ‘assistant’ for the movie and is played, quite brilliantly, by the remarkable Veda Ann Borg (I need to find some more of this lady’s movies but, apparently, I’ve already seen her at some point as she starred as Margot Lane in one of the serials about The Shadow). Borg and Conway make quite a team in this and it’s a shame her character didn’t become a regular role in the series after this.

So, anyway, The Falcon discovers a freshly murdered corpse on a set but, when he tries to show it to the studio security, the corpse has disappeared. He finds it again later and shows it to the police but, by then, a valuable ring which was already on the corpse the first time around has gone. So The Falcon becomes embroiled in the case and it’s the usual affair with almost every character in the film having a motive for the murder and then either dying or being put out of the picture before their guilt is proved. It also includes the now clichéd and, sadly, real life set up where someone is shot by an innocent actor because the blanks in her gun have been switched for live ammo.

The film doesn’t suffer from the usual studio conceit of having The Falcon assailed by various ‘real actors and actresses’ cameos to help promote themselves (and I’m sure I would have loved it even more if it had). Instead, it sticks to telling its mystery story with no real references although, in a couple of sequences, a black cat is highlighted (again, making me think of Conway’s role in Cat People and one of its sequels, The Seventh Victim).

And there’s not much more to be said about this one other than, there’s a really nice moment where we are told the characters are off to the ‘miniatures department’. We are then cut to a fairly typical establishing shot of a car parked outside a building but, then, a big hand comes into the frame and picks up the car, clueing us in that this is indeed the department in question. It’s a nice shot and even though I knew they were going to do it, it was literally only a second before it happened that I twigged it, which is nice.

So another short review but these really are fairly short and somewhat formulaic movies so there’s not always a great deal to say about each one. This is only the second of The Falcon movies that doesn’t have a cliffhanger lead in to an untold Falcon adventure and, I’m guessing this is something which would be the new normal for the series (I guess I’ll find out soon). The Falcon In Hollywood is certainly a fun and fast paced mystery adventure and, looking at the ‘more than healthy’ box office receipts, one of the more successful of the franchise. So, lots to recommend it.

Jurassic World Dominion

Dominion Reunion

Jurassic World Dominion
USA/China/Malta 2022
Directed by Colin Trevorrow
Universal

Warning: 65 million year old spoilers.

Okay, so I loved the original Jurassic Park trilogy, yes, even the third one, even though they got a little worse with each one. However, if you’ve been reading my reviews long enough, you’ll know that I am not exactly a fan of the modern Jurassic World sequels. That being said, the third part of the sequel trilogy is here, Jurassic World Dominion and, it’s actually not a bad film, certainly the best of the modern trilogy.

And it also serves as something of a reunion because, while Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are back from the previous two, along with the clone daughter of a brilliant scientist they escaped with in the last film (which I’d completely forgotten, since I’d only been able to stomach watching that one the once), played here pretty well by Isabella Sermon... it also reunites the three original protagonists from the very first Jurassic Park movie... played once again by Sam Neil, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, who are all given a lot more to do in this one and form half of the narrative, with both sets of protagonists meeting up for the last half an hour or so.

So, yeah, plotwise we have the film opening strongly with a newsreel, reminding people that the dinos are on the loose since the previous installment and that mankind is trying to live with the dinosaurs sharing our planet. But the clone daughter from the previous movie, along with velociraptor Blue’s young offspring Beta, are kidnapped and taken by an evil company called BioSyn. So Pratt and Howard need to get them back. Meanwhile, swarms of giant locusts who will be responsible for everyone’s extinction on the planet due to the way they are eating various targeted crops, are the concern of Neil, Dern and Goldblum, as they infiltrate Biosyn to get the evidence that these locusts are engineered to control the food chain by the company. And, as I said, the film finds the two sets of protagonists working together at the end as they all go through action set piece after set piece.

And, yeah, it’s really not bad. Especially the first half of the movie, where we get more of a glimpse of how mankind is both living with... and exploiting... their cohabitation with dinosaurs. And, honestly, the dialogue in this one seems a lot better too, with even Chris Pratt coming across as a more interesting version of his recurring character, for once.

There are also lots of nods to the original movie, of course. Dr. Wu is back, played once again by BD Wong but, also, we have a character returning from the original Jurassic Park, the nefarious Dogson (who wanted Nedrys to steal samples and put them in his fake shaving foam can, remember?) but, they’ve gone with a different actor this time (apparently, the original actor is now a convicted sex offender so, yeah, I was wondering why they’d not asked him back). There are also a lot of character beats and references back to the original such as Sam Neil giving a blood thirsty speech about how dinosaurs can kill a person, Laura Dern’s delight and enthusiasm about certain dinosaurs and, in a scene where I thought he really wasn’t going to make it this time, Jeff Goldblum’s character once again using something fiery to distract a huge dinosaur to divert attention from his friends.

Probably my favourite sequence, surprisingly, is one involving Pratt and Howard and a new character played by DeWanda Wise, as the team come together in a brilliant set piece set around an underground dinosaur exploitation meet up (dinosaur fights bet on, dinosaur meat for sale etc) leading to a double chase through the streets as various factions try to survive both bad guys and new dinosaurs trained to go after specific laser tagged individuals (yeah, guess who gets tagged by the villains to be dinosaur food?).

The film mostly tends to work but it is the longest of the franchise  (two and a half hours) and it does kinda drag towards the end... I think the last third really loses a little of its appeal where a lot of old clichés are rolled out, such as humans being saved from attacking dinosaurs by other attacking dinosaurs etc. Michael Giacchino’s music is on hand to keep the glue going although, like his previous Jurassic World scores, I really think he needed to put more of John William’s original themes in this, rather than just the odd, passing reference at key points. The score was serviceable but it isn’t great and I suspect the stand alone listening experience on this one might well be a similar story (but at least it’s getting a CD release so, I guess I’ll soon know).

And, yeah, that’s me pretty much done on Jurassic World Dominion... while it’s not as good as, pretty much any of the films in the original Jurassic Park trilogy, it certainly beats the other two Jurassic World movies hands down and so, if you are into those two, you should certainly have a good time with this one. It does kind of redeem the new trilogy a little by not absolutely sucking (which I think is not a quality that the previous two could claim) and so I’m also happy to recommend this to fans of the original trilogy too. Worth a watch if dinosaur movies are your thing.

Black Cat (1991)

La Femme Cat

Black Cat
aka Hak Mau
Hong Kong/Canada 1991
Directed by Stephen Shin
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

It would have been around the mid 1990s that I first saw Black Cat on a widescreen VHS release. I remember liking it a fair bit (turns out my standards were lower then, I think) and so I thought I’d revisit it via the new 88 Films boxed edition restoration (if they’d have boxed it together with the sequels, which I haven’t seen... I would have been more happier but, hey, maybe they wanted to see how the sales of this one did first... but count me in for the Naked Killer movies too, please).

One of the things which puzzled me about the new release is the blurb on the box which says that it was originally intended to be a remake of La Femme Nikita (one of my favourite movies by Luc Besson, known only as Nikita over here in the UK when it was first released... I watched it to death, week after week, at the old Lumiere cinema) from the year before but, when Disney bought out the rights to that film, the director was apparently forced to rethink. Hmm... well you could have fooled me. I remembered it as being a pretty blatant rip off of Nikita at the time I first saw it (one of many but, I could never bring myself to watch the American remakes... I knew the creativity would probably be sucked dry from the original concept) and looking at it now, I can only conclude that, yeah, maybe the director was forced to rethink but, having thought for a bit, maybe thought “Oh heck, I’m going to remake it anyway... up yours Disney.”

At least, that’s what I imagine his thought process was because, apart from having the main character and Anne Parillaud stand in Jade Leung, as character Catherine/Erika - Codename: Black Cat (depending on which personae she is adopting) going on different kinds of missions in the last third of the movie, there are a lot of similarities to Besson’s master work. And I mean a lot.

The set up is a different way for Jade Leung’s Black Cat to get into trouble with the law but, in this, her outright criminal mentality from the source movie is converted into a ‘cornered animal reacting to protect herself to survive’ set of incidents but the outcome is more or less the same. She is recruited by a special government section (actually named as the CIA later in the movie but, honestly, I would be worried about how the CIA was being portrayed here if I was part of that outfit) when she’s escaping her captors in this one. Then she is trained up in a very similar training montage to Nikita and then, after a similar ‘betrayal of a test mission’ by her recruiter, she is put out into the field to perform assassinations... but then becomes involved with a new boyfriend who she tries to protect from her bosses.

And that’s all I’m giving you on the story because, it does have very slight variances from the original material here and there but... not much.

Now, there are some nice shot compositions every now and again where the director and DP will do things like use either colour or large areas of minimalistic dead space within a shot to highlight a character but, for the most part, the film looks competent rather than visually enticing. It’s a ‘work a day’ action film and, on that level at least, it hits spot on. It’s biggest problem, however, because it does tend to ape Nikita right down to some of the costumes, props and various moments taken right from the original - the judo lesson, thrusting the spare gun clip (from pretty much the same gun) into the cleavage of pretty much the same dress etc - is that you can’t help comparing it to Besson’s earlier movie and, well, do that and pretty much anything else is doomed because Nikita is one of those almost perfect films where pretty much everything is done just right (although another partial remake, The Villainess,  which I reviewed here, is not a bad homage). Even the music by Danny Chung, plays like the editor used the Eric Serra score for Nikita to edit to and so, you can clearly hear the temp track coming through loud and clear as almost everything in the score (barring the cheesy romance music) is orchestrated similarly and bears a striking resemblance to that earlier score... like a low rent version of it (and I’m not blaming Chung here, he was obviously told to make it sound like the other score... which he certainly succeeds in doing here).

Now there are a couple of original (in terms of new to this story) concepts injected into this one but they are kind of underused. Black Cat has a chip implanted into her brain which gives her headaches to make her more obedient, so she is reliant on the pills provided by the company to stop the debilitating attacks which hit her very much in a similar manner to the old Sutra headache that Tripitaka used to inflict on the title character of the Monkey TV show in the 1970s. However, it's kind of under explained in terms of the other benefits she’s told it will give her and, yeah, it seems almost incidental to the plot. Similarly, a gun which shoots a bullet of ice which you have to remove from refrigeration five seconds before it’s loaded and fired, so the bullet dissolves in the wound and makes the weapon untraceable, is used only once and, again, it’s kind of incidental.

What saves this movie for me is the absolutely brilliant, almost feral performance by Jade Leung as the title character. Yes, the temperament of the character does match the one that Anne Parillaud manifested as Nikita but, even so, it’s a great turn provided by Leung here and she really goes for it. Some of it looks like it might have been a tough shoot too so, power to her. I wish the same could be said from some of the small, bit parts played by the American and Canadian actors but, yeah, some of them are just awful.

All in all though, Black Cat is actually quite an entertaining movie, once you stop comparing it to Besson’s version... a nice switch your brain off actioner. Now, I have to say that although 88 Films have done, I’m sure, the absolute best they could with the transfer, something seems off with the print... it’s almost like it was scanned in from an old video transfer but, I know that can’t be the case because this thing was run in 35mm in cinemas. But the film stock did look a little washed out, to my eye, in many of the scenes. However, the packaging of this one, if you get the first edition boxed with perfect bound booklet and lobby cards release, is absolutely first class... nice artwork and a box similar in quality to some of those put out by labels like Severin and Vinegar Syndrome lately so, yeah, overall it’s a cool package. And I hope 88 Films do some more of these films in the near future... as I said earlier, I’d love to see both the two sequels to this movie and the Naked Killer films given similar (or even better) treatment.

The Black Cat (1989)

Cat Me
If You Can

The Black Cat
aka Edgar Allan Poe’s
The Black Cat
aka Demons 6
Italy 1989
Directed by Luigi Cozzi (as Lewis Coates)
21st Century Film Corporation
Severin Films Blu Ray Zone A

Well this is a complicated mix. I’ve been wanting to see this particular version of The Black Cat for some time because, well, the great Caroline Munro is in it (her second film for Cozzi after Star Crash, which I reviewed here). However, even though she looks great in this film especially, gives a good performance and has gone on record that she has a good deal of affection for this writer/director, it’s certainly not one of her best films. I love these kinds of movies and even love Cozzi movies like Contamination but, this one is a bit of a mess, I reckon (although it’s a miracle it looks as good as it does, considering the budget Cozzi had to work with).

Okay, so I’ll start off by stating that this film has nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat (as it proudly proclaims to the contrary on the titles on this print)... absolutely nothing and, to be honest, I don’t know why producers would want their film called that when there are so many movies out there with that title already. Apparently, the notorious Menahem Golan (formerly of Canon Films) asked Cozzi to drop some shots of black cats into the film after he’d delivered the finished product because he’d apparently already sold this film as an adaptation of the Poe story. So, I don’t know who he thinks he’s fooling but there are a few added shots of a black cat here and there and the film within a film, which is being finished by the characters at the start of the movie, is said to be a version of The Black Cat... which it also clearly isn’t, it has to be said.

What it actually is, or at least started life as, is the first crack at a third part of Dario Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy, written once again by his ex-wife and long standing writing and acting partner Daria Nicolodi (she had made large contributions to the first two and can even be seen in an early sequence of Suspiria, reviewed here). But Luigi Cozzi is good friends with Argento (I believe he even runs Argento’s shop in Italy) and, after Argento rejected the screenplay to go and do something else, Cozzi didn’t want to do something which might seem like a betrayal... so he rewrote the script so it’s an ‘homage’ to Argento’s Three Mothers movies instead although, it has to be said, homage or not, it still kinda plays out like a direct sequel, it seems to me. At this point, Nicolodi left the production and also dropped out as the lead actress/protagonist, movie star Anne Revanna... to be replaced by Florence Guérin who, actually, does a pretty good job here anyway. Although it’s hard for the actors in this to shine completely because the script is not good... at least that’s what I think.

So, anyway, Anne’s husband Marc (Urbano Barberini) and his writing partner plus his wife (Nora, played by Caroline Munro) have written a script based on the Third Mother in homage to Argento’s Suspiria (all happily referenced in the film). Once a sinister producer, Leonard Levin (played by Brett Halsey) agrees to back the film, things start going wrong and the lead actress cast in the movie, Anne, starts getting dream visitations from the real third mother... and there is loads of jumbled up murder and mayhem ensuing for the rest of the movie. There’s also a kind of cosmic element to the film and Cozzi goes on record on an extra feature on the beautiful new Severin Films Blu Ray restoration of the film, saying that it’s a sci-fi movie dressed up in horror clothing because horror was a lot easier to get green lit back in those days. To me, actually, it almost feels like a close cousin to Lucio Fulci’s Manhattan Baby and, between the two of the movies, there’s not much in it.

Nice things for me were, Caroline Munro’s sexy performance (she’s playing a bad girl here and is not what she at first seems) and the over the top goriness of some of the effects which might make you raise an amused eyebrow. For instance, a professor who is really a good witch, is gotten by the Third Mother by a psychic signal which makes her start bleeding everywhere on her head until her heart explodes and ejects itself from her shattered rib cage. It’s an obviously similar death to some of the ones in Cozzi’s Contamination and also, it's fairly evident that it’s an attempt to both recall and out-do the famous chest burster scene in Ridley Scott’s A  L  I  E  N, except, they never really look all that convincing, it has to be said. Although I do appreciate the effort and feel they have a somewhat satisfying, almost comical feel to them.

The photography and whole atmosphere of the film is nicest, though, when it’s spoofing or paying homage to Suspiria. For instance, when Ann is reading the script for the film, the lighting style is primary greens pitched against reds and, instead of Vince Tempera’s hit and miss score on the soundtrack (but not as miss as those awful needle dropped rock songs which were fashionable at the time), they actually track in Goblin’s main Suspiria theme into these shots too. Which I’m surprised they got permission for but, that’s fine.

The only other thing I’ve really got to say about this... somewhat dull and messy affair... is that there are some beautiful and arresting visual moments in the film but, they never really add up to anything more consistently substantial and so, yeah, nice to look at but it’s not a film I think I would be revisiting often. It’s a shame actually that the producers didn’t think to get Ania Pieroni back to reprise her short cameo as the Third Mother from Dario Argento’s Inferno (reviewed by me here) but, yeah, another missed opportunity, I feel. One last thing though... when Argento did finally make Mother Of Tears (aka The Third Mother) in 2007, it was much more of a successful movie (at least I think so) but it felt less like he was making a film close to the sensibilities of Suspiria and Inferno and more like he was doing a riff, in terms of style, to The Black Cat. Just a thought and I’m sure people would disagree but, that’s what it felt like to me. Mother Of Tears is still a great film though and I wish somebody would put the thing on a definitive Blu Ray edition soon. I definitely need an upgrade.

The Black Cat (1966)

A Cat Above
The Rest

The Black Cat
USA 1966 Directed by Harold Hoffman
Hemisphere/Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Poe faced spoilers.

So the fourth film in Severin’s Blu Ray boxed edition of Hemisphere Horrors is somewhat unusual in that it’s not shot in the Philippines at all. It’s an American movie made by a director who only directed one other feature (under a pseudonym) and that’s a shame because, judging from this thing, he had a lot of potential. It’s yet another film called The Black Cat and also takes its inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe’s story of the same name. However, it’s a cat above the rest, if you will, in that it’s actually, apart from the period (it’s been transplanted to contemporary America), a very straight adaptation of the original tale with almost no trimmings or additions to the ideas in Poe’s text.

Which is a really hard thing to do, actually. There have been many adapations of many of Poe’s tales over the years... heck, I even read an entire book published in the early noughties that was devoted to the tidal wave of cinematic Poe adaptations called The Poe Cinema. But even the most famous ones, which I guess would be the ones that Roger Corman directed for AIP in the 1960s, have added maybe 95% of their own ‘padding’ to these, more than twice told tales. And there’s a very good reason for this... Poe’s short stories are usually very short and don’t have time to tell more than a fleeting impression of a tale or, in some cases, an abstract emotional state brought upon by an internal or external influence. If you’re trying to base a movie on one then you almost can’t help but add to it or you are going to end up with a five minute short instead of a main feature.

This film is different. It’s got an admittedly short runtime at 73 minutes but it’s really done the original story ‘straight’ and, managed to take the main germ of an idea and not really stray too much, other than in terms of slightly more visual ways of getting these same ideas across. And that’s no mean feat to actually do this and still, as in this case, make it fairly watchable and interesting.

The film starts with an opening sequence which is in terrible shape, something which Severin warn you about before the film  starts... that just a few of the shots had to be taken from inferior sources or be lost forever. It’s a silhouette of the main protagonist Lou, played by a guy called Robert Frost (no, not that one) in his only film, as he walks by a lake and his voice reads a poem. I’m assuming the poem he reads is one of Poe’s own poems but I couldn’t figure out which one it was (sorry). This, like the rest of the film, is shot in a really stark, contrasty black and white that I associate with that kind of era of American monochromatic cinema. For me, this film has the kind of feel, due to the stock and the kind of atmosphere it has, of films like Herk Hervey’s original Carnival Of Souls or Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers. The feel of something a young Scorcese or even Cassavetes might make.

We then get a credit sequence that absolutely rocks with white type cards with images of a black cat interspersed and splitting the cards with maybe just a half a second of exposure before the next card... so the image of the cat almost goes into the retina at a subliminal level. This is accompanied by some really cool music which, alas, I’ve got no idea how to find. The film has no composer credit on it apart from a rock group performing some songs at a nightclub (technically not in Poe’s original for sure but, used as a stand in for the visual representation of abstract emotions within the text) and the disharmony between various musical choices throughout the film leads me to believe that this must have been a needle drop score culled from a music library. Scores bought by the yard, so to speak. Never mind the quality, hear the width.

These credits also tell us that The Black Cat in the film is played by Pluto. Pluto is, of course, also the name of the cat in both this film and in Poe’s rendition of the tale although, I have to say, the second cat used after Pluto’s death seems to be a totally different feline actor to me.

And the story follows the idea of a rich, playboy type who has a lot of pets and a wife who he ignores. He is presented here as unhinged and Frost does a good job of being obnoxious and also mentally unbalanced, a state of mind which kind of stands in for the peculiar mental state known by Poe and put down in his tale The Imp Of The Perverse. It certainly permeates his original The Black Cat and, frankly, a subtle concept like the mind’s own whim to follow a path of commitment it doesn’t necessarily want to undertake is probably best substituted with an unsound mental grip on reality as it is here.

As in the original story, Lou cuts out the cat’s right eye after it scratches him and begins to obsess about it (a slight inflection added by the writer/director in this version brings in the idea of a cat being a witches’ familiar as a thematic embodiment of his madness). A second scene in a night club, an establishment used earlier to highlight Lou’s frequent neglect of his wife Diana (payed by Robyn Baker in the first of only two films she made... is this movie cursed or what?), shows the live band are all now wearing eye patches on their right eyes and it’s a nice idea for a visual surrogate of the initial guilt Lou feels at his actions.

And, like the short story, Lou ends up hanging Pluto. However, unlike the random fire that follows the next day and leaves the character bankrupt and bereft and acknowledging unnatural forces at work, bringing a kind of karma to the situation... the fire is actually inadvertently caused by Lou’s act of the killing of the cat. In this version, he hangs the cat from a tree with an electrical power cord and, when the cat is hanging, plugs it into a conveniently situated socket, electrocuting the hanged feline. When he’s in bed with his wife a little later, the electricity from the murder of his pet gets out of hand and starts the fire which leads to his financial ruin.

Before he finds another cat as a replacement for Pluto, there is a sequence where Lou is hospitalised for his increasingly aggressive mental condition and it’s revealed he is having shock treatment and insulin injections. There is a scene where Lou is injected with an obviously painful chemical as he writhes and thrashes on the bed and I can only assume that this is a zealous writer/director using this as another, stronger visual metaphor for the guilt that Lou is suffering from his own, nasty actions. It’s a tough call because, in Poe’s tale it’s written in the first person so the audience is not at a distance from the character and can, therefore, feel a little sympathy from the writer in the situation. In this cinematic version, however, it’s hard to call upon any sympathy for the male lead (who nevertheless does a terrific job and, again, I’m surprised this guy never worked again in the business... at least not under the name Robert Frost).

The film continues to follow Poe’s short description of the character’s downfall when, after going after the second cat in the basement, he (not accidentally in this version) splits his wife’s head open with an axe and then walls her up in the basement. Now, this is impressively done here and the stark black and white photography really helps with the impact of the blood as, in a quick cut from motion to aftermath, we see the axe head buried in Robyn Baker’s skull and blood spurting from the wound to splash the wall and, in another aftermath shot with less motion, its path down her face and clothes. It’s a skillfully timed and edited series of shots and I imagine it must have been quite strong stuff for its day. A similarly strong aftermath shot comes earlier in the film, where we see Lou’s blood coated hand with the cats eye sitting in the centre of his palm.

When the FBI come knocking at his door, the story plays out the same as the source and, when he bangs on his new wall to proudly demonstrate to the inspectors how solid his house is, we hear the sound of the wailing cat which he has accidentally walled in with the corpse of his wife and the two FBI men tear down he wall so we are treated to a shot of the cat jumping out to freedom from the top of the wife’s bloody head. One of the few additions to the original tale, which is now over and which, in a way contradicts the existence of the opening poetry shot, is where Lou tries to escape in his car and the two officers give chase. However, at the last minute (as you kind of know is going to happen), Lou swerves when he sees the black cat in the road and crashes his car in a quite violent piece of editing which really makes the crash feel more than it is (I think a toy car was probably used for one of the rapidly edited together shots). Our last shot of Lou is of his mangled and dead body where, we see, his right eye has also been knocked out from the crash.

The Black Cat is low budget and feels like one of those movies where the director was struggling against finances at every turn but still gave it his all and managed to make, well... a really interesting film for sure, if nothing else. If you are a fan of Poe’s tale then this rendition of it is definitely worth checking out because I’m convinced it’s one of the straightest adaptations of a Poe work in existence. I’m really grateful to Severin for putting this one out there as part of their Hemisphere Horrors box because there’s probably no way I would have bothered to pick this one up as a single edition and I would have missed out. Highly recommended for a certain kind of low key horror aficionado, I think.